Torpor

It's like not even all that hot here. In Paris. Heavy. Like my mother used to say. It's actually gray a lot. Like there's going to be a storm. Which never comes. But lots of wind. Blowing something somebody's way. Last week. On the couch. I told my shrink that I had a lot to learn from torpor. So this kind of weather's workin' for me.

T and I started this experiment up recently. Under my impetus. And coming by way of a mutual realization inspired by Shortbus. I really like Shortbus. I don't love it. But I really like it a whole lot. And one of the things I like about it. That T and I agreed was one of its greatest contributions to society. For all that it concentrates on sex. For all that sex is the thing pushing all of the characters around. What it really shows the best. Is that sex itself is boring. If sex itself can be said to exist. What's interesting is what happens beside sex. What sex makes you see. What fucking brings to light. What is there thanks to sexual relation. Not a narrative. Just a different light.

Given that that's the case. That's what's interesting is what happens while you're fucking. What you see in a different light thanks to the fucking. T and I have made it a policy of ignoring our minimal collection of porn. And putting other images on the screen. Kiarostami's Ten has actually been great. Tarnation was a little bit too much, though some of the 80's singing sequences were great to see. Shortbus itself we haven't actually tried. I'm not sure it would work. But the thing that's been really getting me going? Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

OK. So it helps that it's a movie filled with sexy hunks often half naked and covered in mud. But there are two moments -- so far, because I think there are actually others that have the potential for the same effect -- that destroy me. Especially if the sound is on. But even if I'm just reading along with the English subtitles we put on. There's actually one moment in particular. Bell is one of the character's names. (Funny -- I'm tempted to turn him into an initial, too). Bell is in love. Bell is the only one we see in love. Off of the battlefield. In flashbacks to his babe. The camera looking at her as if it were the character paying attention to her beauty in his mind. They're really beautiful scenes. That don't destroy me. Except that I know they're setting up the moment that does. Bell and some of the rest of the troops have made it over a hill filled with Japanese soldiers. Sowing and reaping destruction on their path. Bell makes it and performs semi-heroic actions (though interestingly for a "war movie," none of the characters are really heroes). He can be semi-heroic because he's able to pay attention in his mind to the woman he loves. The one he calls "you" in the voice-over. The one who calls him "you" over some of the same images. Never in conversation.

But to get to the moment that destroys me. And when I say it destroys me. I mean of course I start sobbing. This last time it was really weird. Because usually when you sob. Your nose gets all runny and gross and shit. But this time it was just my eyes secreting big tears. And chopping my throat into sobs. No snot.

Bell gets over the hill with the rest of the boys. And they finally get letters from home. And the letter Bell gets from home. Begins by saying she's met someone else. The camera is showing us Bell reading the letter. And pans out to the opposite of the close-ups. Or mid-range close-ups. That are the general rule of the film. He looks like he's been hit in the stomach. He gets all small. Smiling. Troubled. Self-conscious. Looking around to see who might be seeing him. As he reads her voice telling him she's met an Air Force captain. And that she's fallen in love. Because it's just gotten too lonely. And we see him being lonely. Being hit by the solitude that overtakes him. In the scene just before that. We've seen him saying. To Fife. Another private. "I just don't wanna feel the desire." Which might be true. But doesn't stop him from feeling the desire. Because we've seen him with that desire many times up until then. And just after he says this. We see her. At a windowsill in twilight. Fiddling with the curtain. Turning her head away. Cut to a bird in the sky. We see the bird because she does. Standing outside something like military housing. In daylight. Like the bird is the desire they each feel in their solitude whether or not they want to. She looks like she's got a chill. She holds the top of her dress up to her neck, and then she sees someone walking in the shadow that runs along the side of the housing. She turns back, obliquely in relation to the camera, holds her elbows, as if she's trying to warm herself up. He's actually shot in very much the same position. Reading her words. Same distance between their separate bodies and the camera. She knows he can say no. "But I'm asking you anyway. Out of the memory of what's we've had together." This gets us close to my destruction when I watch this scene. The inordinate, immeasurable extent of her request. The fact that it is the memory of what they had together that gives her the authorization she needs for her request that he grant her their separation. "We'll meet again someday." And the camera shows her room again. You can vaguely make her out in the mirror which is decorated with a drawing of a plane. As we hear her saying that people who have been as close as they've been always meet again. The image then switches back to Bell. Who's flustered as he holds the folded letter in his hands. Before switching back to an unmade bed. In the half-light of a door cracked open. We hear her saying. "I have no right to speak to you this way." Before we cut back to him. Reading the letter unfolded again. Paying attention to it in a way his traumatized reaction didn't allow for in the previous sequences. To read her saying. "A habit so strong." He knows the strength of that habit. And allows himself to feel it. Reading her inordinately difficult request. And this is the moment that really gets me. She says. With all of his attention. "Oh my friend of all those shining years. Help me leave you." It's in the tone of her voice. It's in the fact she calls him her friend. "Of all those shining years." In a film that's full of a world that shines out from the midst of all the violence that also destroys it. It's probably also the impossibility of his fulfilling her request. And the fact that he might be able to do it anyway. All the things we say to people that we have no right to. And that we say anyway. Attention to that destroys me. Makes me fade into a populated solitude where any I I am is only itself with others. Where I becomes we.

Maybe. I'm speculating widely here. But I also thought this was a good way to start thematizing something we're interested in. Being beside narrative. I love the way you do that in your egret entry. The way you say "i would sometimes say that everything in the past few years has been just a whopping good story. and then. so. me personally, i'd never seen an egret on fire island." The way you tell yourself telling the story. You put your telling on display. And show yourself beside the story. In the event. Malick's films seem interesting that way. The broad strokes of the voice overs, pushed to the point of cliché, often go against the grain of what it is the images are showing. Put words in tension with what we're seeing. Show language to be inadequate to the stellar world. Another element of the world shining.